Posted
by
Soulskillon Tuesday November 06, 2012 @09:01PM
from the good-work-folks dept.

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from Western University in Canada:
"The first human applied clinical study (SAV CT 01) using a genetically modified killed whole-virus vaccine (SAV001-H) to evaluate its safety and tolerability was initiated in March 2012. This study is a randomized, observer-blinded, placebo-controlled study of killed whole HIV-1 vaccine (SAV001-H) following intramuscular (IM) administration. Infected men and women, 18-50 years of age, have been enrolled in this study and randomized into two treatment groups to administer killed whole HIV-1 vaccine (SAV001-H) or placebo. Sumagen announced today the patient enrollment has progressed smoothly and there have been no adverse effects observed including local reactions, signs/symptoms and laboratory toxicities after SAV001-H injection in all enrolled patients to date. With these interim results, the SAV001-H has proven safety and tolerability in humans and given Sumagen confidence for the next clinical trials to prove its immunogenicity and efficacy evaluation."

Well, I'd rather mess with my body as little as possible when it comes to stuff like this. Vaccines aren't always a sure fire bet, and something like AIDS warrants extra circumspection. I'll wait for version 1.5 or 2.0, or 3.0, thanks.

See, this is why they're doing phase I trials on people who are already infected with HIV. You know, like it says in the summary?

This also mitigates the risk of unwanted kids as well as the unjust pressure feminist law has foisted on society in the context of relationships.

What the fuck are you talking about, and what the fuck does it have to do with the article? You know what? Never mind, I don't want to know.

I know I shouldn't (and for all I know the US child support system is totally screwed) but dude, those are his kids, kids cost money and effort to raise, and he needs to provide 50% of both. If he loses his job, then surely these things get re-assessed (I know they do in my country). His kids welfare matters, not his, and if they've been raised by their mother so far, then obviously a judge is going to have her continue to provide that care.

Sorry, but no. If a woman becomes pregnant and wants to keeps the child while the man wants an abortion then that child should be the sole responsibility of the woman. She chose to have sex too, she chose not to use any kind of birth control too and ultimately she decided that she wanted to keep the child.

No more of this inequality. This bullshit were a woman can basically trap a man for his money or his life by forcing him to have her child with her.

Those are some pretty hilarious excuses for why you can't get laid. I know it's hard for virgins to understand, but seriously, AIDs is worth it.

Depends on how desperate you are.

If you are not desperate you have options. You can afford to be with low risk people.

If you will fuck anything that moves and says yes - well you are engaging in risky behavior. And what, are you going to say you didn't know that? That slut you're banging that you met in a bar 3 hours ago well just how well do you know her anyway? You trust her to be honest and forthright? Why? Her or him if thats your thing I'm not here to judge but you get the point.

What the hell? Just how desperate are you? Sex is nice and all, but personally I find it more of a nice bonus when in a serious relationship, rather than something that's worth getting a life ruining disease over just for a bit of fun with some skank.

Actually, if they are looking for volunteers, I'm more than willing. It wouldn't be the first time working around life-threatening biologicals. I was part of a team researching MRSA back in the '90's and the experimental vaccine we all had to have to work around it was no joke for side-effects (necrotizing fasciitis).

Is that your informed opinion or just baseless fear and nonsense? What makes it dangerous?..and what makes you think you're smarter than the genetic engineers who are developing it? the Internet just sucks sometimes because stupidity spreads just as fast as logic.

Wow, since AC knows that its safe, I wonder why they are even bothering doing safety trials on already infected people. Why not just jump directly to mass inoculations?

Actually, in all seriousness, my gay friends tell me that the biggest down side is more or less the opposite of what I said: there's a significant chance that anyone that they're attracted to won't even be interested in people the same gender as them, let alone them specifically. If you think that gay people make up around 5% of the population, there's a one in twenty chance that someone they find attractive will also be gay. And if they are, the probability of them being gay, single, and attracted to you

That's not the problem. Believe it or not, the problem is getting them to use it. My father has worked in Africa for more than 20 years now and there is a massive amount of distrust for this sort of thing among the native populations. Many average people even think this type of thing is a CIA plot to kill them off. With the things people have done to them over the centuries, I'm not terribly surprised, but there has been a lot of effort over the last few generations to fix that, and yet it still remains. It won't be easy to overcome.

strictly speaking, their wars had simpler motivations, their drugs where natural and for ceremonial use, their weapons far less advanced, and they certainly didn't have something as retarded as christianity.

War and its motivations are as old as the hills, drugs were used just like MJ is for 'medicinal' purposes, their weapons were certainly less advanced, and their religion involved human sacrifices (and Christianity has been in Africa longer than it's been in Europe).

Spending money would be one thing. We're spending debt, money we don't have.It's the same as charging to your credit card a thanksgiving meal to a homeless person, so that you can go home and eat a can of beans.

I'm all for charity, but you have to take care of yourself first (take care of, not live in luxury.) The country needs to get out of debt before we continue all this foreign aid.

I have lived in Africa my whole life and that CIA plot thing is old. It's now a "plot by multi-national pharmaceutical companies". At least, it was during Thabo Mbeki's tenure as South African president (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS_denialism#In_South_Africa). AIDS awareness is alive and well here.

As I understand it, humans will always produce antibodies to fight infections like HIV. Unfortunatly, the antibodies that humans normally produce in the attempt to neutralize and HIV infection don't appear to be very good at it. [caltech.edu] The short story is that somehow HIV evolved to avoid having many fewer binding locations so the most effective "Y" shaped antibodies cannot effectively attach bivalently (in two places). This bivalent attach is apparently the most common strategies used by our immune system.

Apparently some people can make more potent antibodies called bNAbs, but often HIV mutates to avoid these as well, but sometimes there are successes.

I'm unclear on why this new Canadian/Korean HIV vaccine would be any better at bootstrapping the immune system than the most recent failed attempts. The only novel part that I can tell about this, is that they are using "whole" (but genetically modified) HIV instead of putting HIV protein genes codings into more common viruses, but if HIV is as crafty as it seems to be, this may only be a simple shot-in-the-dark hope that somehow bootstrapping the immune system will allow the body to come up with a way to fight off HIV before it gets a chance to overwhelm the immune system. Color me skeptical as that was what the other vaccines attempted to do, but it's not clear that this will be a successful route.

I think it's a bit simpler than that. Antibodies are very specific to a protein, and must be, you don't want your antibodies recognizing a protein you make yourself. Retroviruses mutate extremely fast as a result of going backwards, from RNA to DNA. I forget the numbers, but a professor in a molecular biology class I was in calculated it on the board. Given the rate of mutation, the number of viruses in an infected patient, and how fast the immune system responds, the odds of the immune system destroyin

A very interesting question.Especially (from the/. summary) that this vaccin is claimed to cure HIV.Vaccins usually empore your imune system to protect against starting infections. However they don't cure an infection that already has broken out.

Yup. Phase I results aren't generally considered newsworthy. Pharmaceutical companies have drugs get through phase I trials many times per year. Most turn out to not work, or to have subtle but serious side effects.

The kinds of problems that you can actually spot in Phase I trials are the kinds of problems that would wipe out entire cities if you actually put the pills on store shelves. We're not talking about "maybe causes a 10% increase in heart attack risk" dangerous - more like "causes half those who take it to turn purple and gasp for air" dangerous.

It is the logical first step in testing drugs on people, and it confirms that testing it on sick people isn't going to outright kill a bunch of them, and it helps you to understand how it is metabolized so that you can get the dosing about right when you start the "Real" tests.

Vaccinating for HIV usually has no real effect since it only immunizes the host to one HIV antigen when there a multitudes due to highly recombinant genes. The only way this vaccine could work is if it immunizes the host to all possible antigens of HIV or somehow allows the adaptive immune system to recognize some kind of shared antigen that is otherwise not recognized as being pathogenic.

Usually vaccinating for an infection already in place is pointless since the adaptive immune system will either already

Has anyone found any details on the genetic modification. Because... HIV is not alive, a virus is only a blueprint for itself, which the cell starts to copy. And this copying process than leads to side effects depending on what the virus information contains - the symptoms.
So a "whole virus" that is "killed" is plain nonsense.
And as there are only extremely rare cases where there are therapeutically relevant anti-HIV antibodies ever (usually the restriction is T cell based or CCR5 mutations)... a vaccin

I suppose it is that. That is just the envelope protein delivered by another virus (Vesicular Stomatitis Virus). http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19264597 [nih.gov]
These mutate like crazy, so expressing a single one is not going to help much ever to generate a therapeutically active immune response. Having tons of antibody that don't work against the developing HIV mutant is of no use.

No surprise, the impact factor of the journal this system was published in is very low, just 3.36 . Good journals have at least 5-10, the top ones an impact factor of 20 and higher... http://vir.sgmjournals.org/ [sgmjournals.org]

A virus is made up of a protein shell containing RNA or DNA. This virus is enveloped in cell membrane and contains RNA transcriptase to generate DNA from RNA (meaning retrovirus). The virus latches to a beta T4 cell and injects RNA+transcriptase, which transcripts DNA and then inserts it into the DNA, which produces RNA to build new viruses. These viruses are packaged in a protein shell and then budded--they push against the cell wall until a lipoprotein envelope wraps around them (cell wall material), t

Also don't be the child of someone with HIV, or the wife/husband of someone who gets around (esp in countries where the wife is not in a position to refuse the husband), or be in a country that isn't great with medical sterilisation.Or don't contract it in a freak incident such as sharing a leg razor with sister, or the other numerous ways the infection has spread through no fault of the infected.

There is no (Canadian) Western University. It's the University of Western Ontario, sometimes called "Western" for short, but never Western University. It's also only western if you're from southern Ontario since its actually located in the south east corner of the province.

It doesn't, but then again that isn't what this stage of testing was about. But hey, I get it - reading to the end of the first sentence of the summary is a lot of work. A busy man like you can't be bothered to invest that much time before rushing off to enlighten us with your genius commentary.

In many ways you are misguidedly correct. If the governments of Europe did not initiate their heavy colonisation of Africa during the late 19th century, it is unlikely that AIDS would have ever spread outside of the remote areas of Africa where it orginated and would not likely be the pandemic problem that it is today.

Of course it wasn't found prior to the last 100 years. HIV is difficult to detect with current medical technology, and the most obvious effect is AIDS. But no one dies of AIDS, they die of whatever their weakened immune system was unable to fight off, such as a common cold.

Oh, and which government do you think had the ability to engineer a lentivirus 100 years ago? Because I'd like them to provide my healthcare...